THESIS: Introduction

Here it is! At this point, I need to thank my college advisor and thesis reader:
Professor Conforti and Professor Ryden. First of all, I need to thank
them for reading this stuff over and over and over and over . . .
Second, for telling me that the particular battle I am trying to fight
is still there to be fought. (I was deathly afraid the entire time I was
working on my thesis that some professor somewhere would publish a new
tome making my thesis utterly obsolete.) Third, at the risk of sounding
snide, I need to thank them for supplying me with opportunities to hone
my opinions. Many of the arguments presented in this thesis came about
during lectures where I either vocalized my dissatisfaction with a
professor or student's opinion or sat stewing in philosophical fury. I
may be the last humanities student alive who actually takes academic
arguments seriously, but hey, it's gotta be someone!

I
need to thank Professor Conforti, especially, for being such a
goal-oriented advisor. For employment reasons, I had to get the thesis
done within six months or less. Professor Conforti's "let's get it over
with already" attitude was a huge asset in the achievement of that goal!

Concerning my purpose in writing the thesis (other than
wanting to graduate), the Introduction, which follows, is more or less
self-explanatory. Suffice it to say, This is my attempt to bring into
the academic study of literature, the kind of in-depth and enthusiastic
discourse that fans carry on everyday.

Please feel free to comment, only not, I beg you, on textual errors. At this point, as the thesis is being bound and stuck somewhere in the USM library, I really
don't want to know. To reach me, e-mail: woodburykate@yahoo.com

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Inside Knowledge: Votary Theory at Work

People who are fond of books know the feeling of
irritation which sweeps over them [when disturbed].
The temptation to be unreasonable and
snappish is one not easy to manage.The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The
first time I forgot myself while reading was in second grade. I barely
remember the book now, except that it was an easy reader and about a
cat. I do remember that I became so absorbed, I was late for school
lunch. It was the beginning of many years of inattentiveness. Ten years
later, I would get moved to the front of eleventh grade math for reading
Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bears during class. Upon entering
the work force as a secretary, I learned never to bring interesting
books to my desk. I was liable to bark, "What do you want?" to
interrupting supervisors.

My enthrallment with books
started before I learned to read myself. I was read to as a child,
mostly by my mother, who also told me fairytales, including her own
(about a troll named Milo). I developed a predisposition then for audio
performances. I would also act out the stories I heard. I would
experiment mentally, and physically, with crafting fictions: if you
change all the female characters in Cinderella to male and the male
characters to female, does it alter the story? Suppose a certain event,
crucial to the original text, does not occur? Suppose we add a
character--what happens then? Story was a real as well as a made thing.

Despite
growing up without a television, I was surrounded by performances:
ballet (my sister Ann's interest), plays in the park--Shakespeare, Oscar
Wilde--opera, symphonies, Peter, Paul & Mary, black &
white oldies (shown at the old-style, downtown theater), Star Wars, The Cat from Outer Space.
Once I bought a television at the age of twenty-six, I became equally
enamoured with commercials, sitcoms and television dramas (Criminal Minds, Buffy, Star Trek).
The remarkable aspect of my youth, however, was not the plethora of art
to which I was exposed but the fact that so little of it was
accompanied by any valuation.

Sincere Marxists and
semiologists will insist that I did unwittingly receive the valuations
of a dominant culture. A Caucasian female living in upstate New York, I
was inculcated through the shows I attended, the radio I listened to,
and the movies I watched with images, icons and concepts that supported
and furthered the agendas, opinions, values of my white, middle class
culture. The equation is complicated somewhat by the fact that I am a
Mormon and was raised as one, but nevertheless, I am, in fact, Anglo and
middle class.

Suffice it to say that defending my
Anglo, middle class upbringing was not a factor of my childhood. I never
needed to defend anything I read to anyone. We went to see Shakespeare
because my parents like Shakespeare not because he was valuable or
important or canonized. We also went to see the aforementioned Star Wars
and scads of Little League baseball games. Every event was approached
with the same interest, humor and post-show analysis. The idea of
placing books or playwrights or films into hierarchies was never
addressed, nor were the books, plays and films linked to political or
social agendas. I am still flummoxed when I run across readers who
equate their particular likes and dislikes with membership in a specific
political party.(Footnote 1) Most importantly, my reactions--despite
the post-show analysis--were never formalized or made relevant. No one
asked me if I'd caught the symbolism in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series (my
comprehension of the symbolism was taken for granted); no one asked me
what Shakespeare meant to me. (A lot.) And certainly, no one ever asked
me if I intended the novels of Orson Scott Card to form a life-long
interdisciplinary reading pattern between religion and science-fiction,
although that kind of happened anyway.

Subsequently,
upon entering college, I experienced a minor shock. In retrospect, the
Humanities program at Brigham Young University in 1989 was, if anything,
geared towards formalism, even New Criticism; formalism, I don't mind;
what I wasn't prepared for was the high-mindedness attached to
literature and the subsequent politics that accompanied that
high-mindedness. Reading literature did not just mean that one learned a
great deal about the Romantics, Beowulf and Maya Angelou. It gave one clout of sorts. If one read Henry V, one could make comments about the Gulf War. Or women's rights. Or anything.

It
occurred to me that the humanities was fighting a desperate, and
rearguard, action against the hard and soft scientists who did use their
disciplines to comment on such things as women's rights or, in the case
of the hard scientists, to address the provable workings of the
universe (all while we humanities scholars were nitpicking nuances in The Tale of Genji).
Justification for one's discipline appeared to be tied to one's ability
to slather the outcomes of that discipline onto the rest of the world.
Hence the desire by humanities students, and professors, to use their
Insights Into Human Nature to Say Profound Things. Which seemed, to my
twenty-year-old mind, unbelievably dumb. I gravitated towards professors
who emphasized authorial intent and historical context and who were, as
well, overwhelming engaged by their particular specialties (I am happy
to say that they were there to find). In the meantime, I developed, as
twenty-year-olds are wont to do, a Theory in which I condemned every
artistic work that meant something. Author makes statement equals bad
literature, I decided.

That lasted right up until I
realized that I'd condemned C.S. Lewis and Dostoevsky amongst others. I
tried to fit exceptions into my theory and then gave it up. But my
dissatisfaction with the search for Meaning or Purpose in literature
remained, a dissatisfaction that has been exacerbated by current trends
in critical theory. The compulsion by humanities students to Talk About
Life appears to have intensified in the last ten years. In issuing
pronouncements on race, class and gender, the humanities discipline
appears more and more like an extension of the Sociology Department, its
language a blend of labels and jargon and a rather excessive use of the
word "ideology."

Power lies at the core of this
abandonment of aesthetics for "relevance." As in the game of hot potato,
humanities students breathlessly follow the exchange of power from
discipline to discipline, group to group. Now, women have it (who will
get it next? where did it go?). Now, it's back to the white males. Oops,
it crossed over to the resistant ideology. Nope, the dominant ideology
snatched it back. A discipline intended for the study and enjoyment of
literature has turned works of art into sociological springboards--what
can we do with Jane Austen? Do we love her because she is a feminist? Do
we loathe her because she isn’t feminist enough?--a type of blatant
self-promotion fraught with irony, considering the anti-capitalistic
tendencies of humanities departments. Straightforward commodification
would bother me less, but I refuse to hand Pamela over to scholars who will claim great insight while deploying Pamela in their gender wars. (Although to be fair, I doubt Richardson would have minded.)

Where,
I wonder, are the scholars who love literature just because it is
literature? Who don't need to dismantle it or politicize it or defend it
in terms of "real-life applications?" Who experience, as Roland Barthes
called it, jouissance, the fun of the thing. I know these
scholars exist. I have myself been in thrall to artistic works, in love
with words, images, dialogue, faces. Moreover, I have encountered
amongst my friends and relations (and through them, other lovers of
artistic works) a fondness for entering fictional worlds. My friends and
family and I will discuss film and novel characters as real people, not
bothering to preface our remarks with "according to the author" or "as
seen through our eyes." I have also witnessed a flexible and objective
independence by which fans will reject an event within the "canon" story
because it doesn't ring true while remaining faithful to the
author/director's overall characterizations and design.(Footnote 2)

Too
often, this type of creative involvement is perceived by humanities
scholars as a nice, but useless, side-effect, not the principal response
to the arts under discussion.(Footnote 3) Again and again, they return
to the value of a work as a source of historical, sociological, even
personal change. In her book on the Oprah Book Club, Kathleen Rooney
echoes an idea common amongst many scholars (and readers) when she
writes, "[I]n many cases the very impulse to read [amongst high brow and
low brow readers] may very well be delineated in terms of . . . .
self-improvement." It is foolish, Rooney argues, to attack Oprah for
doing the very thing promoted by academe. She continues, "One of the
things--but certainly not the only thing--genuinely good books can do
for us as readers is inspire us to higher levels of morality, in the
sense that they put us through the paces of moral awareness and
affiliation, and disaffiliation." Rooney, I should state, makes a
valiant effort to not reduce the literary search for self-improvement to
mere platitudes or lessons. Nevertheless, her attitude that literature
should mean or do something--should feed us in a practical rather than
creative way--is at the root of not only Oprah's Book Club but
contemporary academic approaches to the arts.(Footnote 4)

The
search for a usable purpose in the arts is hardly new to Western
Civilization. It extends back as far as Plato. Many groups and cultures
consider that the arts are only palatable if they contain a moral
lesson. However, the issue I wish to address is not, Do people believe
that art should educate? but, What is the job of the humanities scholar
in regards to the arts? Is it our job to fight over artistic works,
pushing and molding them until they say the "right" kinds of things, the
things we personally approve of and hold important, insightful and
necessary to society? Should every production of Taming of the Shrew
be preceded by a lecture on the evils of chauvinism, or, contrariwise,
on the resistant aspects of feminist ideology? Are humanities scholars
condemned forever to hold the position of cultural judges: this is
acceptable because it addresses race, class and gender; this isn't
acceptable because it promotes capitalism and other nefarious
ideologies?

I hope not. I believe the job of the
humanities scholar is to understand an artistic work on a creative
level. Political commentary, gender commentary, social commentary may be
entertaining, but they are not our primary responsibility. Rather, the
artistic works of any age--be they popular, middlebrow, classical or
indeterminate--are themselves the scholar's responsibility: a wide and
deep area, hence the need for specialties. Our responsibility is not one
of judgment, although judgment is not always out of place. Rather, our
responsibility is to acknowledge, comprehend and just plain care about
artistic works--literature, plays, poems, films: the outpouring of
creativity throughout the ages.(Footnote 5) We should learn their
contexts, learn how they have been used, how analyzed. We should
understand their audiences. Most importantly, we should look for the
creative desire, manifested throughout these works, in both the artist
and in the reader/spectator.

Once again, hopefully
with more success that when I was twenty, I have developed a theory. In
this case, the theory is meant as a tool, a way of approaching artistic
works that will address them at the creative level. I call this tool
votary theory.(Footnote 6) Votary theory, while not ignoring historical
or social realities (the influence of context), focuses on the
creativity within artistic works rather than on their power-related or
usable applications (social, political, personal). More precisely,
votary theory postulates that power is not, in fact, the overwhelming
determinant that so many critical theorists suppose. People do not watch
plays, read books, listen to music, go to movies for the sake of
reinforcing political (and therefore power-ful or power-less) positions.
Finally, votary theory presents a set of tools with which to address
individual works. Hopefully, through votary theory, the worst excesses
of critical theory can be avoided. Artistic works should never be
subsumed by signifiers, ideologies or political labels, languages that
do almost anything except understand the things they describe.

1. A secretary (and political science major) I once worked with informed me that Republicans don't like Harry Potter.
Since I know a number of Republicans and since most of them have read
and liked Rowlings' books, I was at a loss as how to answer. "Uh…."

2.
Many Buffy fans were upset by a last minute cancelled wedding that
occurred in the second to last season. As a result, some fans, like
myself, re-imagined the script to accommodate the unexpected ending
while others simply ignored the event as "non-canon"; however, no fan
abandoned the story line for that season as a whole. Like it or not, the
characters didn't get married.

3. Reader response
theorists being the notable exception. The current trend in reader
response, however, is largely sociological, i.e., Elizabeth Long's Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1984, reprinted 1991).

4. Kathleen Rooney, Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (Fayetteville:
The University of Arkansas Press, 2005), 76. "[T]ruly great novels,"
Rooney writes in the same chapter, "result not only from an author's
intellectual, political, social and cultural seriousness"--yikes!--"but
also from an author's ability to evoke a kind of enigmatic,
philosophical and almost spiritual quality," 98-99.

5. There is a beautiful passage in Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose
(New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1980) in which the narrator imagines
books conversing through time: "Now I realized that not infrequently
books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves . . the
library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a
long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialog between one
parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be
ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds,
surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their
conveyors," 342-343.

6. My use of the term "votary" comes from a 1946 review of The Duchess of Malfi by Brooks
Atkinson in which he refers to playgoers as "votaries of horror." I
prefer "votary" to "fan," not because my conceptualization of a votary
is very different from that of a fan but because "fan" carries a
somewhat single-minded/popular culture connotation. I needed a broader
term.